Tag: dailyprompt-1913

Not sure why this came to mind. It is an old story. The kind buried in so much dust and memories you can only tell what it is by the shape.The house I stayed in that winter sat at the edge of a small village an hour outside Zürich—one of those places with winding roads too narrow for logic, where the fog clung low like a secret and the trees never lost their wetness. I hadn’t planned to go there. I had meant to be somewhere else. Basel, maybe. Or Lugano. But a train was delayed, and then another, and by the time I checked the time again, I was standing in front of a gray house with wooden shutters that had long forgotten how to close properly.

Ironically, just next to it—barely ten steps away—stood what used to be a psychiatric hospital. A tall, rectangular building with too many windows and a strange stillness that clung to its stone. It had been renovated into a hostel years ago, the sign said, in a font too cheerful for the history beneath it. Backpackers came and went. They laughed loudly and cooked pasta at midnight, unaware or uncaring that people used to scream inside those walls. That once, someone was probably locked away for seeing the same things I’d started seeing too.

I rented the attic apartment in the house beside it. It had a sloped ceiling, a single radiator that wheezed like it was haunted, and a window that framed the old asylum like a painting. Everything in the room was slightly off. The floorboards tilted to the left. The walls met each other at strange angles, so that no matter how I stood, I never felt entirely upright.

And I couldn’t stop thinking: There are no corners here.
Just soft bends.
As if the architecture itself had given up on sharpness.

—

I arrived with a heavy kind of silence inside me.
Not grief exactly.
More like fatigue from carrying around a shape I no longer fit into.

I was supposed to be writing.
Instead, I slept.
I walked the hills, fed birds pieces of bread that tasted like cardboard,
and stared into shop windows without seeing a thing.

The hostel kids came and went in waves. They brought guitars, dirty boots, languages I’d forgotten. Sometimes they waved. I always waved back. But I never spoke to them.

Except for one night.

—

The Girl with the Braided Hair

She was sitting on the hostel steps, her back against the wall, sketching on the back of an old receipt. Her hair was dark and braided tight, with loose strands curling like vines around her face.

She looked up and said, “You live in the house that leans, right?”

I nodded.

She grinned. “Bet the dreams are weird in there.”

I didn’t answer. But she kept talking, like we already knew each other in another version of this life. “Used to be, this place was for the ones who lost their way. People thought walls could keep the mind still.” She tapped her head. “Turns out, it’s not that simple.”

Then she handed me the drawing. It was of the house I was staying in—but twisted. Exaggerated. Melting into the hillside like it didn’t want to exist anymore.

“It’s more honest this way,” she said.

—

When the House Began to Speak

That night, something changed.
I stopped avoiding the mirror.
The one above the small writing desk, with its chipped edge and the faint outline of someone else’s fingerprint in the glass.

I looked into it longer than I meant to.
And slowly, the face staring back stopped looking tired.
It looked…
open.
Fractured, yes.
But not beyond recognition.

Something moved in my chest.
Not a thought.
Not a word.
More like a shift in gravity.
Like the darkness inside me had stretched its limbs and decided it was tired of being silent.

I sat at the desk, picked up a pen,
and wrote three pages without stopping.

Not because I had something profound to say.
But because something inside had been waiting for permission to speak.

—

The Demon Doesn’t Always Fight You

That’s when I understood.
This thing I’d been carrying—
the old ache, the brittle shame, the persistent hum of doubt—
it wasn’t trying to ruin me.

It was trying to help me lift.

It had been shadowing me not to drag me down,
but to keep me from floating away too soon.
To tether me to something real.
Something raw.
Something mine.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Tilted Room

I left that village two weeks later.
But the lean of that house stayed with me.

The softness of its crooked walls.
The mirror that stopped lying.
The girl with the receipt sketches.
The asylum-turned-hostel still echoing with a strange kind of forgiveness.

And I carry this with me now:

• Darkness is not always damage. Sometimes it’s depth.
• The places that make you feel crooked may be where your truth fits best.
• Healing doesn’t ask you to become new. It asks you to carry your old self with care.
• And sometimes, the most haunted places offer the most peace—because they’ve already held what you’re afraid to face.

—

So now, when the days feel heavy—
when the weight returns like an old song or a long train ride—
I don’t try to escape it.
I nod.
I sit at the desk.
I open the window.

And I let the darkness
not bury me,
but steady me
as I learn, again,
how to lift.

I once stayed in a house that didn’t cast shadows.
Not because the light was perfect,
but because something inside the walls refused to let them gather.

It was on the edge of a town that doesn’t appear on maps,
north of somewhere forgettable,
a place with crooked vending machines and a clock tower that didn’t tell time.
Nobody lived there permanently.
People arrived.
Stayed a while.
Left a note.
Then vanished.

I hadn’t planned to go.
But the train doors opened,
and I stepped out without asking why.

—

The room I rented was small.
Futōn on the floor.
A desk with uneven legs.
One cup, one spoon,
and a window that faced a forest that was always almost raining.

But it was the mirror I remember most.
Oval. Hanging by a wire that hummed when the wind blew.
Every morning I looked into it,
and every morning it showed me someone else—
a version of myself I’d buried quietly beneath achievement,
smiled away in polite conversation,
and buried under to-do lists that never questioned why.

The man in the mirror didn’t look sad.
Just tired.
Like he’d been waiting for me to say something honest for years.

—

The Stranger Who Knew the Weight

On my third night there,
I met a man in the hallway.
Or maybe he wasn’t a man.
He didn’t blink when I did.
Didn’t breathe when I did.
He simply stood there, hands behind his back,
watching me like I was an echo that had finally returned.

“You carry it wrong,” he said.
“Carry what?” I asked.
He tapped his chest.
Then his head.
Then his back.
“All of it,” he said. “You carry it like it’s against you.”

And just like that, he was gone.
The hallway remained.
But the shape of it shifted,
as if it had just remembered something I hadn’t.

—

How Darkness Can Push

The next morning, I wrote like my fingers belonged to someone else.
Pages poured out,
not from inspiration,
but from pressure—
like something inside had been holding back a flood
and finally cracked open under the strain.

It wasn’t beautiful writing.
It wasn’t even good.
But it was true.
And that made it holy.

I realized then:
the thing I’d been running from—
the grief, the rage, the strange fatigue that followed me like a second skin—
it wasn’t here to stop me.
It was here to fuel me.

Not to drown me,
but to deepen the water I was meant to swim in.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Bruised Vessel

I didn’t leave that house with answers.
But I left with strength.
Not the kind you show off.
The kind that hums quietly under the skin.

The kind that understands:

• Some weights aren’t meant to be dropped. They’re meant to be lifted differently.
• Demons don’t always destroy. Sometimes they steady your hand.
• Beauty lives not in the absence of pain, but in the motion it creates.
• Not everything that haunts you is here to harm you. Some things stay because they remember who you were before you forgot.

—

I still dream about that house sometimes.
The way the floorboards spoke in sighs.
The tea that tasted slightly of sleep.
The mirror that no longer lied.

And sometimes,
on days when the world feels too sharp,
and I wonder if I’ve made any progress at all,
I feel something press gently against my spine.

Not to push me down.
But to help me lift
what I could never carry alone.

And I remember—
not all darkness is empty.
Some of it
has hands.